One of the things that amazed me about this incident was the real-time nature of the news. The first accounts were "airplane slides off of runway", and they got progressively more detailed. Even in the days of television news that'd be reduced to a teaser at the end of the hour and an update at the nightly, but with the web it's updates as they occur.

I was on a flight from Philadelpha to Atlanta at the time of the crash. It was sort of disconcerting getting into my truck and the first thing I heard on the radio after landing was reports of this accident.

Probably trying to find their way out of the airport... Although I'd assume that the airplane did damage to the fences, in "this post 9/11 world" I'll bet that it's not clear that you could take a rescue vehicle out of the airport via the end of the runway: There are probably berms and ditches and other things that the airplane slid right over, but that'd stop even a beefy truck. So it's not just the mile or two down the runway (if the emergency services are half-way down the runway, that's a mile to the end), but it's out the gate, around the airport, etc...

And I heard that the cockpit crew were pretty much last out of the airplane. Given that the whole evacuation took under two minutes (the FAA mandates that airliners that serve U.S. airports be evacuable in 90 seconds), and that the airport was on lightning alert so that no ground crew was outside, I'll bet that by the time the copilot made the edge of the freeway that, at best, the fire crew were just starting up their vehicles with several miles of driving ahead of them.

A minute is both a damned long time, and a very short one.

And, petronius, my grandfather was a fireman and a Red Cross safety instructor: One of the things that was drilled into us from an early age was "count the rows to the exits". I try to do it when I get into a plane (or an auditorium) and quiz myself when I'm getting off, just to be sure.